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Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Musings on Trion

I had planned to write mostly about EQ2 today, I'll have to save that for another day, there's some big news about Trion that's been a bit unsettling with the MMO community. I've kind of been reading stuff in my feed about it, lots more info and less speculation as the days go by. Trion has been sold, word out is that Gamingo has bought Trion. But is it really all doom and gloom? Massively has info on more of that in the link, head there for more details if you're curious, as do many other sites a quick Google search should be easy. Also the Ghar Station has some interesting stuff too, more recently.

This isn't like Wildstar where the studio is closing down. While they'are reports of a massive layoff, who didn't see that coming with the state of Rift in the last year or so. Not surprising at all. The game has focused on all the wrong things, like the Prime server, leaving the normal servers to flounder and stagnate for far too long. I'm very sad a lot of people lost their jobs, I hope the staff cut from Trion find jobs swiftly and wish them all the best. As a customer I saw a bleak future, this is something better than closure, it's a possible future for these games. It could end up like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, but maybe not. I wonder if Dead Simon is still around, I like him and his love of puzzles.

Other studios have been picked up and actually hung in there. Look at Cryptic, they were bought by PWE and they're still going. Look at SOE, now DBG, they're still going and we thought the end was near, well, some of us. But they are actually doing better than many expected, the EQ games are releasing content still, expansions every year. Change isn't always bad.

Gamingo is a company that immediately rang a bell with me. They bought out Aeria games and merged. They actually own many things, if you scratch under the surface you'll see that there is a bit more to this company. None of the games seen to have suffered and are still going quite a few years later. Aura kingdom is actually one of the games in the roster that I'm quite fond of, so there is a bit of hope in my eyes. I've seen a few goodbye posts to Rift, which is kind of premature. Out of the roster Rift is one of the better games Trion has, they surely didn't buy it for Atlas Reactor, possibly Arch Age, but Rift is still a solid title.

Somewhere back a couple of years or so ago Trion dropped the ball with Rift. If you follow me here then you know it's been bothering me for quite some time. The live (normal) servers have been neglected besides events, housing items and the cash shop. Big ticket items selling for up to 300$. Did that have to do with showing profits off to a potential buyer? All I know is that the direction for Rift died out when Trion launched Prime. In my opinion nobody asked for Prime, it was a lazy way out to cash in on subscription based nostalgia.

Anyhow, I do hope I am right, Rift has a lot of potential. Wildstar did as well, but NCSoft is known for putting limping MMORPG's down. Where Gamingo/Aeria still has Last Chaos going, does anyone besides me remember that game? It's old, 2007 release. I even dabbled with it years ago, it still sports gender locked classes. Taking a look at the greater scope of things, Rift was floundering. Worst case scenario the game gets even pricier items in the shop and eventually shuts down for reals. As of now it is still up and running with no plans to sunset the game with the transition, I don't think the sky is falling just yet. Honestly, as a player I'm glad something happened, every time I logged in this year, I've just wondered how long it was before something happened. And yes, I'm still logging in, as you can tell from the Halloween shot above :)

1 comment:

That's pretty much how I felt when I read the news. Given the degree to which Trion's reputation has fallen over the years and the state the games were in, I actually thought that for players (not, obviously, for the Trion staff) this was *good* news. The alternative would almost certainly have been the end of the games altogether (ArchAge might ahve found a new home via XLGames I guess). This way they should all carry on. Gamigo didn't buy them to do anything other than keep running them - they have no other value - and Gamigo seem like a reasonable publisher in my limited experience.

Time will tell but for players I would think it will be business as usual.